Articles

The annual election of International Board of Directors of the Polytechnic Institute Alumni Association, Inc. will take place at the Annual Meeting on Tuesday, June 21, 2016 at 6:00 PM sharp in Bern Dibner, LC400, Five MetroTech, Brooklyn, NY 11201. All alumni are invited to attend and vote for (5) International Board of Director members who will serve a three-year term, begining July 1, 2016. Reception from 5:30 PM - 6:00 PM.

The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur, the late Joseph J. Jacobs’s memoir, is dedicated to his wife Violet “Vi” Jabara Jacobs, of whom he wrote: “With a modesty that belies the great woman she is and loyalty that I cannot live without, Vi is the heart in the anatomy of this entrepreneur. Because of her, I breathe.”

The annual election of officers and directors of the Polytechnic Institute Alumni Association, Inc. will take place at the Annual Meeting on Tuesday, June 2, 2015 at promptly 6:00PM in Rogers Hall, RH116 , Six MetroTech Brooklyn, NY. Reception at 5:30PM. All alumni are invited to attend and vote.
Officers (two-year term):

The NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering and its home in the MetroTech Center—dreamt up by Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden and then Polytechnic University President George Bugliarello in the mid-1970s—have experienced profound transformations through the decades. Where there were once elevated train tracks for the Myrtle Ave. El, there now lies a bustling four-lane road; Rogers Hall, once the site of a razor factory, now houses some of the most exciting engineering research going on in the country.

From the Protein Engineering and Molecular Design Lab at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, Montclare and her team focus on designing and generating protein-derived building blocks that are tailored to serve numerous applications, such as tissue engineering, drug delivery, imaging, energy and other such domains that require novel biomaterials.

I’ve been teaching technology at Fort Greene Preparatory Academy since the school opened more than four years ago, and I’ve been working with the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering’s Center for K-12 STEM Education for almost that long. As part of the AMPS/CBSI program, I had a terrific graduate fellow in my classroom for two years, James Muldoon, an electrical engineer, and this year my fellow is Matthew Moorhead, a mechanical engineer.

Ryan Cain no longer teaches at Brooklyn’s P.S. 3 The Bedford Village School. He left behind his after-school robotics club, the 3-D printers he had worked so hard to obtain for his classroom, and the sand table where he taught the impact of flood events on our built environment by using model building structures created by students using 3D printers. “It was a hard departure,” he says. “My principal and co-workers were not happy I was going, and of course I felt some guilt for leaving the students.”

No one would argue that it takes a lot to be a teacher—years of training in pedagogy, hours of lesson planning each week, classroom management skills, deep reserves of empathy along with the ability to be firm—the list could go on and on. Now what if you’re charged with getting your students excited about STEM fields and preparing them for the higher-level course work that leads to rewarding careers in the tech sector?

Any NYU School of Engineering faculty member who has worked with high schoolers as part of the Center’s programs can pull from their memories examples of exceptional students. Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Nasir Memon and Postdoctoral Fellow Tzipora Halevi can pull out an actual paper, “Touchpad Input for Continuous Biometric Authentication." The paper lists as its primary author Alexander Chan, a Hunter College High School student who worked in their lab in 2013 as part of the Applied Research Innovations in Science and Engineering (ARISE) program.

Ask a group of teachers to brainstorm lesson plans or techniques to gain the cooperation of unruly students, and you expect the discussion to be lively. Ask them to come up with ideas for new businesses and products, and their discussion is every bit as vibrant.

Richard E. Wener, a professor of environmental psychology in the Department of Technology, Culture and Society, has significantly furthered our ability to build more humane, just, and functional institutions, and his book, The Environmental Psychology of Prisons and Jails: Creating Humane Spaces in Secure Settings, is considered the seminal work on the topic. He was recently honored with the 2013 Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) Career Award, in recognition of his substantial contributions to the discipline.

Nikhil Gupta, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, has been selected as the recipient of the ASM International Silver Medal, which recognizes a career of distinguished contributions in the field of materials science and engineering and service to the profession. Gupta’s work focuses on lightweight materials with high damage tolerance for helmets,body armor and vehicle structures—research with enormous potential for making those products not only lighter but safer.